…into a commercial for religion? Give out some Halloween candy with Bible verses on the wrappers. No, I don’t know of any pagan, Gnostic, or Coptic equivalent products. (Thanx and a hat tip to Marlow Harris.)

Today’s case in point: Those chewy, gritty, “nutritionally balanced” processed snack foods of the Apollo age, Space Food Sticks, are back! (Albeit only available online, in bulk quantities, imported from Australia.)

…about too many things, but could we really be able to cope with the possibility of a world without chocolate?

…Valentine’s Day? Treat yourself to Bittersweets, candy hearts with downbeat messages. (found, like the two items below, by Fark.)

…you’re in cahoots with GW Bush’s assailant!

Trick or Treat

by guest columnist Mr. Hedley Bowes

MUSINGS ON THIS PAST All Hallow’s Eve season:

It’s 1991 (the shitter) economically; and after hundreds of thousands of layoffs this year and entire sectors wiped out, the government and business communities are looking to consumers to save our collective asses.

Sen. Patty Murray introduced the “Let’s Go Shopping” bill, which would put the Federal government in the business of rebating state sales taxes for a 10-day period during the fourth quarter of the year. This was announced on Halloween, a day when we’ve all been scared into avoiding shopping malls at all costs, lest we put ourselves at risk of terrorists.

It’s been said quite often in the last month it’s our patriotic duty to go shopping. And spend money. Tell that to the corporate community and the venture-capital investors.

Never mind the record: Consumers continued to spend and buoy a sluggish economy in the four quarters since last year’s “election.” Business spending fell sharply after last November and has continued to be soft. Sure, there was a rush in the energy sector; for a while it looked like that would be where the action was. But look where Enron is today (near-bankrupt and seeking a buyer). Gasoline prices (everywhere but here) are the lowest in years.

The second “economic stimulus” package this year is aimed at stimulating big players like IBM ($1.4 billion), General Motors ($833 million), General Electric ($671 million), Chevron Texaco ($572)r, and Enron ($254 million). Any one of these corporations has the option to:

• A) take the tax break and rehire or retrain employees at risk of layoff;

• B) plow the money back into the balance sheet, thereby improving earnings and buoying stock value; or

• C) exercise option B, while shutting domestic facilities in favor of continued offshore outsourcing.

Go ahead. As a contracted bonus-getting, shareholding C-level executive, pick your optimal A, B, or C.

Krispy Kreme, a franchise operation not from here, opened its much anticipated and over-hyped Issaquah store early one late October morning. Lines formed the night before as people camped out. One would think Mick Jagger himself was making the fucking things.

We were privileged to have a friend who camped out overnight for the precious things. After tasting one, we can say the secret ingredient of Krispy Kreme doughnuts is their high fat content. The stuff is also very likely airwhipped with powdery sweet confectioner’s sugar. A new drug for these tough times.

What’s going on here?

Historically, this region creates national (and global) trends: Microsoft, Redhook, Starbucks, Chateau Ste. Michelle, Red Robin (and any number of mid to high end theme restaurants) K2, JanSport, et al.

But things have been so quiet around here lately that a relative unknown from across the country can come in and leverage enough free PR from the local press to offset hundreds of thousands of startup dollars. And people are lining up overnight, as if they were waiting for a rock star to show up. Nope, it’s just a doughnut.

Have we lost our special place as an idea and business incubator? Or did we simply over-commit to high technology (a once darling sector) and big business that we forgot about the little things (like doughnuts)?

Game Three: Made for TV. GWB throws out the first pitch in the third game of the World Series. I watched the final inning, waiting for truth to prevail. I wanted so much for Arizona to bring the game to an even 2-2, to take it into extra innings so that we might have some hope that this was not just a made for television win. But it was not to be. And so the writing is on the wall. Through their own special brand of black magic, New York was now certain to take all three games at Yankee Stadium and take the series in seven.

Is it a matter of will? Destiny? Or (as with elections, energy markets, layoffs, tax breaks, and doughnuts) just the way things are “meant to be?”

Thankfully, this was not the way it played out. I don’t favor the Diamondbacks that much (indeed, the irony of a bunch of “desert snakes” taking on the New York Yankees in this of all years was not lost on me)

But the Yankees have come to represent the way things seem to be done in America: Presidents not elected but awarded the post by a court; corporate executives taking bonuses on declining returns on top of salaries that outstrip those of average workers by multiples of 1,000. Our world seems to be one where things are not decided but predetermined, where the decisions we do make as a people are somehow subverted, where the deck is increasingly stacked toward wealth and power: Don’t Mess With Texans (or those with Texas-sized appetites for power, wealth, fame…).

Then, in the ninth inning of the seventh game, a simple sacrifice brought the wealth and power of dynasty down, leaving in their places a restored sense of truth and hope. What’s great about baseball is that it can accomplish this peaceably. Baseball, our national catharsis—this American oddity is still very much alive.

“HOW TO BE PATRIOTIC and yet not the slightest bit reassured by Bush & Co.”

DESPITE THE DOT-COM CRUMBLE, you can still find an e-commerce site offering just about anything you’d like, including fully packaged election campains.

SOMEHOW, nothing quite makes a deluxe, keepsake holiday gift like a package of Oreo cookies.

As promised a couple weeks back, here is my preliminary list of some of what I love about this nation of ours. Thanks for your emailed suggestions; more are quite welcome.)

• Corn dogs, and the proud people who make and serve them.
• 217 cable channels, at least 10 of which are showing the same dumb movie at any given time.
• Upbeat/consensual pornos in every known fetish.
• Urban intersections with a Starbucks on every corner.
• Suburban intersections with a 7-Eleven on every corner.
• September issues of Vogue thicker than the models.
• Fabulous babes coast to coast, many of whom have powerful careers.
• Boys happily puking into bushes at Florida Spring Break.
• Dr. Seuss, Mary Engelbreit, Charles Schulz, James Thurber, R. Crumb, Chris Ware, and Dan Clowes.
• Fudge-banana swirl ice cream.
• Dodge Darts.
• The Internet, MP3s, chat rooms, multi-user dungeons, and QuickTime movies.
• Jack Benny, Laurel & Hardy, Harold Lloyd, Looney Tunes, and Corey Feldman.
• The gum that goes squirt.
• Novelty stores with chocolate nipples and penis candles.
• The sports-book room at the Cal-Neva casino in Reno.
• The films of Russ Meyer and John Waters.
• The long lonesome highway, and the proud truckers and tourists who traverse it every day.
• Ann-Margaret, Betty Page, Mae West, Willa Cather, Beverly Cleary, Ella Grasso, Susan B. Anthony, Marilyn Chambers, and Jessamyn West.
• Sleazy detective magazines, “true crime” books, film noir.
• The Brooklyn Bridge, the Gateway Arch, the Brown Derby, and the Corn Palace.
• Anyone can grow up to become a corrupt politician or a sneak-thief business executive.
• Summer in Anchorage, winter in Honolulu, autumn in New England, and spring in Seattle.
• Old Faithful, the Mammoth Caves, Monument Valley, and the Trees of Mystery.
• Dollywood, Opryland, Wisconsin Dells, Wall Drug, Enchanted Village, and the Bible theme parks of Florida.
• All-you-can-eat buffets and bottomless cups of coffee.
• BBQ beef, Cajun catfish, smoked salmon, chicken nuggets, and pork rinds.
• Potato chips, ice cream cones, Hostess Sno-Balls, and non-dairy creamer.
• Crossword puzzles.
• Gene Rayburn, Betty White, Garry Moore, Bill Cullen, and Charles Nelson Reilly.
• David Letterman, Johnny Carson, Conan O’Brien, Jon Stewart, Fred Allen, Ricki Lake, Sandy Hill, and Rosie O’Donnell.
• Indie motels with fantastical neon signs.
• Butter-Lite flavor microwave popcorn.
• No-fault divorce.
• Retractable-roof stadia.
• Millions of assorted cults (religious, celebrity, musical, medical, investment, etc. etc.).
• Muddy Waters, Ethel Waters, and Barbara Walters.
• Bix Beiderbecke, Dizzy Gillespie, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Wayne Horvitz, and Raymond Scott.
• Julie London, Vikki Carr, the Andrews Sisters, the Mills Brothers, Motown, Phil Spector, the Ventures, the Ramones, the B-52s, and the Young Fresh Fellows.
• Wine bars, sports bars, pickup bars, pickup trucks, monster trucks, semi rigs, and fork lifts.
• Aaron Copland, Henry Partch, Charles Ives, Frank Zappa, and the Residents.
• Johnny Cash, Bob Wills, Tammy Wynette, Chet Atkins, Duane Eddy, Tex Ritter, Hank Williams, Loretta Lynn, Buck Owens, Kitty Wells, and Homer & Jethro.
• Pulp magazines, bodice-ripper paperbacks, and $100 collector’s editions of Walden.
• The Big Mouth Billy Bass, the Kitchen Magician, the Pocket Fisherman, and the George Forman Grilling Machine.
• Lou Piniella, “Louie Louie,” Louis Prima, Louis Jordan, Joe Louis, Tina Louise, and Louise Bourgeois.
• Miss America, Miss December, miscagenation, and Ms. magazine.
• Simon & Schuster, Simon & Garfunkel, and Simon & Simon.
• Folks from all the rest of the world are here.
• Quite a lot of the things I love about other countries are here too.

(This article’s permanent link.)

I LIKE FAST FOOD. Wanna make something of it?

Many do. (Want to make something of it, that is.)

Eric Schlosser’s new book Fast Food Nation is only the most recent example.

Schlosser’s tirade states, essentially, that all of America except for the Enlightened Few such as himself (and presumably his readers) are mindless sheep, being led to a metaphorica slaughter of obesity and cholesterol by greedy mega-corporations, callously out to rake in billions off of lethal meals at home and then to export this monolithic Americulture to the world.

At best, these arguments are misguided. At worst, they display a classist basis.

I like fast food (although I know it’s a pleasure best enjoyed, like so many other pleasures, in moderation). It’s cheap, tasty, unpretentious, and gets you back to your busy day. Feeding doesn’t have to be sit-down and from-scratch, any more than sex has to always involve a whole weekend at one of those dungeon B&Bs.

And fast food doesn’t necessarily have to be huge and corporate. Look at those tasty burger and gyros booths at street fairs, or at the feisty local drive-ins and hot-dog stands in most cities and towns.

And it sure doesn’t have to be a symbol of American cultural imperialism. Look at the feisty taco wagons of White Center and South Park, or the teriyaki and bento stands that are a modern fixture of most Northwest urban neighborhoods.

Fast food, or something like it, exists in nearly every society big enough to have urban dwellers on the go. (Although many of U.S. ethnic-restaurant favorites were actually invented here, by clever immigrant chefs.)

So get off your exclusionary-tribalist purity trip and have a fry. Or a spicy chicken bowl. Or a falafel-on-a-stick. Or some flying morning glory on fire.

IN OTHER NEWS: Had the privilege of meeting Floyd Schmoe, patriarch of the Seattle Quaker church and longtime peace activist, in 1991, around the time he started the Seattle Peace Park across from the Quaker center in the U District. He was in his mid-90s then, still alert and still a devout activist for pacifism. If I live as long as he (passing this week at age 105), I can only hope to have achieved half the good works he did.

NEXT: Images full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

ELSEWHERE:

• Advertising’s latest whipping boy: Modern art….
• The last gender taboo: Women who admit to actually liking men (found by New Pages)….

IT’S BEEN A WHILE since I did an all-list column, but this and the next will be such.

Today, in a post-Thanksgiving gesture of sorts, are as many Things I Like as I can think of right now (just to placate those readers who falsely complain that I never seem to like anything), in no particular order:

• Snow. Hope we get some in Seattle this winter.
• Discovering a great new band.
• Luxuria Music, a streaming net-radio station playing a mix of lounge, jazz, surf, bebop, soundtracks, and other “music to stimulate the entire organism.” It’s co-curated by The Millionaire, formerly co-leader of cocktail nation faves Combustible Edison.
• Brave New Waves, a nightly program of experimental and just plain odd music from the CBC (and streamed online at 9 p.m. PT).
• The inventive products of North America’s packaged-food and fast-food industries.
• Sex. (Well, duh….) Specifically, the kind of sex that brings two people closer together on psychic-emotional-physical levels.

  (Though there’s also much to be said for daydreamt fantasies involving Adrienne Shelly in a private railroad car with piped-in Bollywood movie music and a few cases of Reddi-Wip.)

• Harper’s Magazine.
• Collecting old magazines, especially the kinds that aren’t normally collected (Time, Seventeen, Family Circle).
• Pre-1970 nudist books and magazines. Hard to tell which aspect of these images is more worldview-skewing: The sight of pre-hippie-era grownups (of all ages, genders, and physiques) unabashedly nude, the sight of unabashedly nude grownups in deliberatley non-erotic (sometimes even anti-erotic) poses, or the accompanying text sermons defending the lifestyle as being just as clean, wholesome, and sexually repressed as any deserving aspect of mainstream American life.

  (The new “Imagined Landscapes” show at Consolidated Works includes a group of three hyperrealistic paintings by NY artist Peter Drake based on ’50s nudist-mag images, only with suburban front yards for backgrounds instead of open picnic grounds.)

• The new Office Depot at 4th and Pike.
• Unexpected phone calls from people I personally know who aren’t trying to sell me something.
• The recent election mess. No, really. It was one of those fun interruptions of the daily grind, and it kept going into ever-further absurdity levels like an Absolutely Fabulous script.
• Glow-in-the-dark green plastic. You can get it in everything from yo-yos to toothbrushes to Burger King promo toys. Heck, you can even get an Apple iBook in it!
• Grocery deliveries.
• Online reference libraries.
• Pyramid Snow Cap Ale.
• Digital video camcorders. The devices which just might yet kill Hollywood. (You’re getting me one for Christmas, right?)
• The recent Pac-10 football season, which came down to the last weekend with three (count ’em!) of the conference’s four Northwest teams battling it out for the championship–including the long-humbled, now-proud Oregon State Beavers!
• The conveniences of modern life; including but not limited to indoor plumbing, electricity, telephone service, public transportation, trash pickup, a division-of-labor setup wherein many of us don’t have to toil out in the fields tending crops unless we want to, digital cable, photocopiers, and electronic bill paying.
• Truly wacky ’70s movies, such as Lisa and the Devil or Dolemite.
• Money. Just love the stuff. Wish I had some now.

(If this amused you, there’s also a separate Things I Like page on this site, which duplicates almost none of the items on this list.)

MONDAY: Another list, this one of people who aren’t really better than you.

IN OTHER NEWS: Thursday saw a skinny scab-edition P-I but no Times, at least not in the downtown, Capitol Hill, and North End neighborhoods of my holiday travels. Today will likely see no Friday entertainment sections; causing movie-time-seeking readers to grab for weekly or suburban papers. What will the Sunday Times look like, aside from preprinted feature sections? We’ll find out.

ELSEWHERE:

• A former member of fun-punkers the Dead Milkmen talks about his lifelong appreciation for dumb children’s records….
• Too many chain stores?…

LAST FRIDAY AND ALL THIS WEEK, I’ve been reminiscing about Seattle during the fall of 1975.

I’d arrived in town in September of that year after a childhood spent in Olympia and Marysville, WA and Corvallis, OR. I didn’t know what I was going to do with my life, except cease living with my parents and stay the heck out of the military.

Within two days I’d found what would now be called a “mother-in-law” apartment in Wallingford (in a home run by a devout Catholic couple with a Mary shrine in the front yard; within a year, they got a brand-new Betamax VCR equipped with “Swedish Erotica” tapes.) Days later, I got a graveyard-shift job at the U District Herfy’s (a once locally-prominent burger chain; that particular branch is now a Burger King).

I hadn’t many career expectations at the time. Writing was something I seemed to be good at, but I also could see myself in acting, local TV, music, retail, graphic design, even bike-messengering (which I wound up doing for a while).

Some of my initial memories:

• Metro Transit. I’d grown up with school buses, but hadn’t lived in a jurisdiction with municipal bus service. How convenient! You just stand in one spot for as long as half an hour and you’ll get anywhere you want to go (except some really obscure places or places out in the ‘burbs).

• My first neighborhood. I’d known Wallingford only as a hillside by the freeway. I soon discovered a perfect little neighborhood with an independent supermarket (the Fabulous Food Giant), two indie drug stores, an indie hardware store (Tweedy & Popp, still there), an art-house movie theater, the original Dick’s Drive-In, and block after block of handsome old bungalows. At the time, it was still a working-stiffs’ area. Before long, it would be taken over by professors and lawyers; by now even they can’t afford it.
• Pioneer Square. Corny as it now seems, I remember eating a cinnamon roll on a late-summer afternoon outside the old Grand Central Bakery on Occidental Park and thinking this was the perfect time and place to be at.
• Daytime TV. Game shows and entertainment-talk shows I knew; but this new night job left me sedate enough at midmorning to finally begin to appreciate the slow-grinding emotionality of the soaps.
• Late-night TV. Johnny Carson had been around almost as long as the Space Needle. I’d seen his show very rarely as a teen. Now I got to see it any night I wasn’t working. Either I’d just gotten old enough to realize he wasn’t that tremendously funny, or his move from NY to LA had killed his creative spark. Today, I’m more apt to believe the latter.

  That fall, a weekly Carson rerun would be replaced by a new show, initially titled NBC’s Saturday Night. The contrast only made Carson’s shtick seem even dumber (but in an endearing sorta way).

• The movies. Marysville’s only theater at the time was a drive-in (which for a while showed “hard R” films in full view from I-5). Corvallis had a few indoor cinemas, showing mostly mainstream Hollywood product. But in Seattle I got to see the whole cinematic gamut; especially with that newly-minted Seattle International Film Festival, and with Randy Finley’s almost-as-new chain of art houses (the first of which is now the Grand Illusion).
• Hippies and ex-hippies. Until I started meeting a number of them in person, I had no idea how docile and mumbly-voiced they could be, or how much of a superior species they thought they were, just because they’d been to a couple of protest marches five years before.

  (My teenage encounters with the fundamentalist-Christian universe had already taught me to beware those who claimed they were the only ones going to Heaven on the basis of picayune doctrinal trivia.)

• Minorities. I’d known native Americans and a few Asian Americans, but African Americans were a new in-person experience. They mostly turned out to be almost nothing like the media images of them at the time, even the “positive” media images.
• Chronic depression. Despite having lived a squeaky-clean life to that point, I was still barely awake toward the 4 a.m. end of my work shifts at the burger joint, and was fired quite promptly. To be cast out from supposedly one of the world’s easiest jobs sent me into what I now realize was a blue funk of prescribable-for proportions.

All in all, it was a time of diminished expectations, of a big city that still, mistakenly, thought it was a helpless little cowtown.

Despite everything that’s happenned for the better around here since then, and there’s been a lot, I miss something of that funky humility.

MONDAY: Back to the future with the simplest, stupidest business motivation book ever written.

ELSEWHERE:

• Dennis Miller’s Monday Night Football jokes and references explained for you in microscopic detail! (found by Dandot)….
• “How to Win an Argument with a Vegetarian”

AN EARLY REMINDER to make plans for our MISCmedia@1 party on Thursday, June 8, starting around 7:30 p.m., at the quaint Ditto Tavern, 5th and Bell. Yeah, it’s 21 and over.

TO OUR READERS: Yr. ob’t corresp’d’t has been summoned to that great spectator sport known as jury duty. Daily site updates may or may not, therefore, be spotty over the next few days. Stay tuned for more.

SOME SHORT STUFF TODAY, starting with a few attempts to correct some commonly-believed but untrue “facts”:

• There is no “healthy cigarette.” Not even (or rather, especially not) that brand that’s also commonly but falsely believed to be made by Native Americans. Yeah, the additives and flavorings stuck into some other cigs aren’t nice to inhale. But tobacco itself’s lethal enough on its own.
• Safeway Food and Drug is not owned by the Mormon Church. It’s really owned by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, the leveraged buyout/junk bond kings chronicled in Barbarians at the Gate. The Mormon church also doesn’t own CBS, Coca-Cola, or Hershey’s.
• You can’t really get away with a racist joke by backtracking and claiming you were only making a “parody” of a racist joke. That tactic’s known in the trade as a “lame excuse.” Try it too often, and you’re likely to end up with a “parody” of a punch in the face.
• You’re not ‘the next step of human evolution,’ no matter how much E you take. You’re just a normal, mortal, fallible human being like all the rest of us.

THE FINE PRINT (in the masthead of the women’s bodybuilding magazine Oxygen, no relation to the women’s cable channel and website of the same name): “Oxygen reserves the right to reject any advertisement without reason.”

At last, someone strikes a blow for rational arguments in advertising!

JUNK E-MAIL OF THE WEEK: “The domain: www.miscmedia.com, is ranked #68919 out of 400118 domains in the WebsMostLinked.com database.”

Alllrigghhttt! This month, we’re gonna try to make it all the way up to #67324!

THE MAILBAG (via Nick Bauroth): “Enough with the baby-boomers already! Can’t you find something else to blame for your shortcomings? And no, yuppies and fratboys are not acceptable substitutes.”

Actually, when I criticize others it’s for the sake of criticizing others, not out of misplaced blame or jealousy or any other excuses.

And as for any “shortcomings,” they’re just about all my doing (or the doing of specific, deep-rooted, influences upon my individual personal/career development).

I come, after all, from the same age group and race/gender status, in the same metro region, as folks who’ve gone on to win Pulitzers and Emmys, get elected to public office, record triple-platinum albums, and/or threaten to permanently stifle all present and future competition in the software industry.

IN OTHER NEWS: It may be the end of the company Seattle’s landmark Smith Tower was named after.

MONDAY: Never mind Never Mind Nirvana.

ELSEWHERE:

• The creators of this Bad Candy website appear to have a cross-cultural phobia thang going on. Just about the only product they dislike that’s not from Asia or Latin America is Circus Peanuts (which I, naturaly, love)….

SOME SHORTS TODAY:

WITH THE STEADY demographic cleansing going on in central Seattle, the city’s remaining non-millionaires (i.e., most of us) have increasingly sought refuge from high prices at the glorious Children’s Hospital Thrift Store.

But soon, that will no longer be an option. At least not at its current convenient 3rd Ave. location.

You know the drill by now: Condo developers are taking over and razing the half-block containing the store, along with the gloriously unpretentious Palmer’s eatery-drinkery next door.

The store’s suburban branches will remain, as will its online shopping site, for those who need bargains but have Net access.

The store’s also being immortalized in Lost in Seattle, an ambitious online map site containing “3,000 Seattle shops and buildings.” (The site’s still in beta form and already way out of date.)

TONIGHT’S THE FIRST “First Thursday” gallery crawl in Pioneer Square that won’t include anything at the now-deserted Jem Studios-Galleries, now being refitted for dot-com offices. I’ll miss the four-story party atmosphere, the mix of serious and less-than-serious works in every genre from semirealistic painting to abstract sculpture to video-enhanced live performance, and the camaraderie of hundreds of creators and gawkers sharing the feeling of creative empowerment.

I won’t miss the permanent paint stains on some of my best clothes, a remembrance of the final Jem exhibition night when I sat too close to a performance-art piece that devolved into a coed naked body-paint wrestling match. (The things you can do in a space when you don’t care about getting a cleaning deposit back….)

JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: Haven’t had this dept. in a while, but will promise to get back to it every so often. This time, it’s Jones Soda Whoopass Energy Drink. Tastes a little better than the better-known Red Bull brand (that favorite of waiters, bartenders, and late-night software coders).

The locally-made Jones product also pays homage to the Asian origin of this beverage genre, with a manga-style cartoon street-fighter mascot, and a name that sounds as if it had been coined by Japanese English-as-a-second-language speakers. (The company’s website also promises, “It makes your pee super yellow thanks to all the vitamin B6!”)

(It’s absolutely no relation to another product, an employee-motivation novelty toy called “A Can of Whoop Ass.”)

TOMORROW: Modern art as capitalist tool.

ELSEWHERE:

• There are still slacker movies out there. Are there slackers anymore?…
• “Leonard Nimoy Should Eat More Salsa”….

THE TRADITION CONTINUES: For the 14th consecutive year, here’s your fantastical MISCmedia In/Out List. Thanks to all who contributed suggestions.

As always, this list predicts what will become hot or not-so-hot over the course of the Year of the Double-Oughts; not necessarily what’s hot or not-so-hot now. If you think every person, place, thing, or trend that’s big now will just keep getting bigger forever, I’ve got some Packard Bell PCs to sell you.

(P.S.: Every damned item on this list has a handy weblink. Spend the weekend clicking and having fun.)